Gerard
Heumann is an architect and town planner in Jerusalem. He served as head of the
Ramat Beit Shemesh master plan team for David Reznik, Baruch Reznik: Architects
& Town Planners.

Two decades ago, no one foresaw that the
Jerusalem and Bnei Brak ultra-Orthodox population overflow would reach Beit
Shemesh: Today though, Haredim make up a large part of the expanded city's
inhabitants.

...The
only reasonable option, then, is to bring the Haredi leadership, through legal
and democratic political means, to finally understand that if they wish to
govern and have responsibility for planning, managing and maintaining a modern
city, they must act fairly.

Three
decades later, when the State of Israel was actually created, the issue over
extending suffrage to women and their eligibility for public office arose once
again.

It seems
the issue remained a controversial one for many within the ultra-Orthodox
community. Sensitive to this struggle, Rabbi Meir Ben Zion Hai Uziel,
then the Chief Sephardic Rabbi of Israel, refused to be silent and published a
legal opinion, “Concerning the Participation of Women in Elections for Public
Institutions,” on the matter.

Rabbi
Uziel boldly insisted that women had a “basic human right” both to vote and be
elected to public office. He stated that women, no less than men, were
created in the Divine Image, and observed that women were the intellectual
equals of men.

Shaha Ilan, Hiddush, believes that the recent
increase of haredim in the workforce will tail off unless yeshiva allowances
are cut.

“If we want to see the
majority of haredi men at work we need to make it so it won’t be profitable to
stay in yeshiva and not go to work,” he says.

According to Ilan, a
haredi man studying in kollel can receive between NIS 4,000 and NIS 5,000 a
month from government stipends and benefits as well contributions from his
kollel.

For someone without any higher education, earning more than this sum
through employment is tough, so there is little economic incentive to go out to
work, especially when bearing in mind extra costs like child care that may
result if both parents are working.

Both the Haredim and the Arabs (and especially
the Bedouin) suffer from low levels of education, which makes it impossible
for them to join the workforce and earn a decent living. And, since these
populations have high birth rates, the gaps and the poverty will merely grow
and the burden on the productive middle class will simply get heavier.

This is because Netanyahu has always submitted
to the Haredim. In the coalition agreement with the ultra-Orthodox Shas party,
he agreed to raise child allowances and sanctioned a situation in which core
subjects do not have to be studied in Shas' schools. And anyone who does not
study mathematics and English cannot find lucrative work even if they want to.

Only recently, Netanyahu consented to
infuriating discrimination, agreeing that subsidized housing will be
distributed according to the length of a couple's marriage - in other words,
going mainly to the ultra-Orthodox, who generally marry very young - and this
is clear encouragement for them not to work or serve in the army.

What happened to us? How did we get to a situation where
fathers cannot watch their twelve year old daughters? What drives this
radicalization?

Religious Zionism's view of itself has been distorted due
to its need to resemble the ultra-Orthodox society, its inferiority complex in
the face of ultra-Orthodox society and its need to cope with a permissive
world; this distortion cannot be tolerated.

Police arrested two non-religious Jewish teens
near the Dung Gate in the Old City of Jerusalem, on Monday morning, after they
reportedly called for gender segregation on buses departing the Western Wall.
The youths were apprehended sporting bullhorns.

The police, who took the two young men, 16 and
17, into custody for questioning, suspect they were hired by ultra-Orthodox
Jews. Israel Radio reported that the teens were paid 25 shekels an hour for the
job.

Living in
Israel pulls one towards the extremes. I’ve been challenged by the troubling
developments in Israel regarding the exclusion of women — events that I’ve
written about in The Sisterhood: the trend toward gender segregation on buses
and public spaces in Haredi neighborhoods, the controversy over women’s
singing, and the harassment of schoolgirls in Beit Shemesh, the obsession with
excessive modesty rules.

The more
these extreme circles subjugate women, the greater the temptation to join many
of my secular Israeli friends in seeing all religion as the feminist’s enemy.

The
State of Israel is doing "not badly" compared with other countries,
and, "if you deduct the Arabs and ultra-Orthodox from inequality indexes,
we're in great shape," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told TheMarker on
Wednesday in a special interview for the Passover holiday.

Clearly
Shas did not invent a thing. Theirs is merely a cynical ethnic variation on the
ultra-Orthodox, Ashkenazi theme of educating people toward ignorance and
idleness, which was introduced in the 1980s by Rabbi Eliezer Shach and his
court. Here there is no rift: All of them will lead in a few decades to the
sinking of the Zionist enterprise...

This is
not a reality show. It's a true story that's been going on for years. No one
denies it, neither the psychiatrists nor their patients: Psychiatric drugs are
being given to ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students, men, seminary girls and married
women at the request of rabbis, yeshiva "supervisors" and marriage
counselors.

The
furor that erupted recently after a psychiatrist prescribed pills to
participants on the TV reality show "Big Brother" - apparently to
help the production and not the patients - convinced some Haredi patients to
come forward with prescriptions and documents attesting to a far broader
practice.

The girls in one class in a prestigious girls'
seminary in Bnei Brak are worried about a "wedding drought." While
dozens of girls from other classes are already successfully matched, none of
the girls in the class has gotten engaged since the beginning of the year.

A ministerial committee seeks to cancel
preschool subsidies for working parents, a move that critics fear indirectly
favors ultra-Orthodox families.

The panel's proposal last week contradicts the
Trajtenberg Committee's recommendations to bolster the middle class.

Currently, the status of an ultra-Orthodox man
enrolled in a yeshiva is similar to that of a student or an employee, but to
meet the criteria per household his wife has to prove she works at least 28
hours per week.

President Shimon Peres
met Sunday morning with Shas' spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. During the
meeting, Yosef called on the president to push for convicted spy Jonathan
Pollard's release following his recent hospitalization and deterioration in his
health.

[Georgia’s]
president gave him an assignment of historic dimensions - to repossess for
Georgia the Monastery of the Cross in Jerusalem, after it was lost over 300
years ago to the Greek Orthodox Church.

Air Sinai has launched a new route on Friday to
shuttle Coptic Christians between Egypt and Israel, allowing pilgrims to visit
their most holy sites for the first time in decades, the Egyptian newspaper
Al-Ahram reported.

The development comes in the wake of the death of
Patriarch Shenouda III, the head of the Egyptian Coptic Orthodox Church, who
for decades prohibited Copts from traveling to Jerusalem and other sites due to
the "Israeli occupation."